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Both men rose, and each drew from one pocket a programme of the next day's events, and from the other a little paper-covered volume called "Form at a Glance." Armed with their paraphernalia, they retired to a table in a window. "Come and live the higher life with us, Joan," cried Harold Jupp. "What are you reading?" "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society," Joan returned icily.

Browning continues: 'Spite of my ailments and bewailments I have just all but finished another poem of quite another kind, which shall amuse you in the spring, I hope! I don't go sound asleep at all events. 'Balaustion' the second edition is in the press I think I told you. 2,500 in five months, is a good sale for the likes of me. 'Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau' was written in Scotland, where Mr.

In Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau there is nothing enigmatical. "It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself," so Browning wrote to Miss Blagden soon after the publication of the volume. Many persons, however, have supposed that in Fifine at the Fair a riddle rather than a poem was given to the world by the perversity of the writer.

Lord Dufferin; Helen's Tower Scotland; Visit to Lady Ashburton Letters to Miss Blagden St.-Aubin; The Franco-Prussian War 'Herve Riel' Letter to Mr. G. M. Smith 'Balaustion's Adventure'; 'Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau' 'Fifine at the Fair' Mistaken Theories of Mr. Browning's Work St.-Aubin; 'Red Cotton Nightcap Country'. From 1869 to 1871 Mr.

It was followed by "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society," a book suggested by the collapse of the French Empire, and recalling the scathing satire with which he lashed the impostures of spiritualism in "Sludge the Medium." In 1872 he published "Fifine at the Fair," to the delight of those who loved him, and, as usual, to the irritation of those who did not.

Thus Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is certain that every dodge in his thin string of political dodges has been the true means of realising what he believes to be the will of God. Every one of these meagre swindlers, while admitting a failure in all things relative, claims an awful alliance with the Absolute. To many it will at first sight appear a dangerous doctrine indeed.

Fifine at the Fair, like Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, is one of Browning's apologetic soliloquies the soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards actually falls. This casuist, like all Browning's casuists, is given many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the poem is called cynical.

The simple truth is that she was the poet, and I the clever person by comparison remember her limited experience of all kinds, and what she made of it. Remember on the other hand, how my uninterrupted health and strength and practice with the world have helped me. . . . 'Balaustion's Adventure' and 'Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau' were published, respectively, in August and December 1871.

To these memorable fragments from Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau one other may be added that towards the close of the poem which applies the tradition of the succession by murder of the priesthood at the shrine of the Clitumnian god to the succession of men of genius in the priesthood of the world "The new power slays the old, but handsomely."

This may be undertaken with skill and vigour, but hardly with enthusiastic pleasure. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is an interesting intellectual exercise, and if this constitutes a poem, a poem it is; but the theme is fitter for a prose discussion. Browning's intellectual ability became a snare by which the poet within him was entrapped.